Evans Wittenberg - Archeopsychic

Chimento Contemporary is please to announce a exhibition with new work by artist Evans Wittenberg, ARCHEOPSYCHIC.

Evans Wittenberg’s new sculptures of concrete, steel and bronze emulate the natural process of fossils and geology. Typically working without formal premeditation, he pursues sculptures of scale and efficiency from materials that harden or mineralize over time. Ratios of concrete to sand to water come together based on each piece’s discrete cast or hand built process. Figures and creatures emerge, on the brink of becoming. Wittenberg’s installation is populated with latent beings from a paleontological realm. A seven foot tall pterodactyl like skeleton stands erect inside an open faced plywood crate as if ready to be unpacked and interpreted. The steel and cast concrete birdman is presented like a prized fossil at some natural history expo, but with its towering size and exaggerated features, it’s more animated than it is austere. It’s counterpart sculpture is an iconographic sun uplifted on a steel base. The towering sun and skeleton face each other suggesting a radioactive landscape that the viewer is beckoned to enter.

A crustaceous looking form, bronze with green patina, is as alien as it is familiar. It has claws and spindly tentacles. It is reminiscent of a crab, an imagined crab, coursing its way through the evolutionary process. Wittenberg’s creature is a record of the lost wax process it underwent to reach its final state, but it is also a dynamic life formit’s patina will continue to oxidize forever. It rests aptly on a hyper tufa pedestalan anthropic rock of moss, perlite and portland cement capable of plant growth. Other works are informed by the perfect symmetry of trilobite fossils, creatures from the Earth’s ancient seas. Wittenberg uses concrete and steel or bronze to make sculptures based on these early complex life forms, combining the trilobites’ iconic spherical shaped head with a more humanlike rib cage. Trilo bite progressing into human, or perhaps human devolving into extinct sea insect and mounted on the wall like a trophy.